The solar flare which erupted on March 7 was the most powerful eruption ever observed by Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT).

The flare, classified as X5.4, made the sun briefly the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky.

"For most of Fermi's four years in orbit, its LAT saw the sun as a faint, steady gamma-ray source thanks to the impacts of high-speed particles called cosmic rays," says Nicola Omodei, an astrophysicist at Stanford University in California. "Now we're beginning to see what the sun itself can do."

At the flare's peak, it was emitting gamma rays with two billion times the energy of visible light, or about four billion electron volts - easily setting a record for the highest-energy light ever detected during or immediately after a solar flare.

The sun may be entering a period of reduced activity that could result in lower temperatures on Earth, according to Japanese researchers.

Officials of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation said on April 19 that the activity of sunspots appeared to resemble a 70-year period in the 17th century in which London’s Thames froze over and cherry blossoms bloomed later than usual in Kyoto.

In that era, known as the Maunder Minimum, temperatures are estimated to have been about 2.5 degrees lower than in the second half of the 20th century.

The Japanese study found that the trend of current sunspot activity is similar to records from that period.

The researchers also found signs of unusual magnetic changes in the sun. Normally, the sun’s magnetic field flips about once every 11 years. In 2001, the sun’s magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere, flipped to the south.

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

The impact of solar irradiance variations on Earth’s surface climate has been debated by many in the past. Based on correlations between solar variability and meteorological changes, the Sun-climate link seems obvious but, as is often stated, correlation does not prove causation. Previously, any link was disputed because the amount of energy delivered by the Sun was deemed too small to have a significant impact. New satellite measurements indicate that variations in solar ultraviolet irradiance may be larger than previously thought, forcing a reevaluation of the impact of solar variation. A recent report in the journal Nature Geoscience claims to show just that—a link between the 11 year solar cycle and Northern Hemisphere winters.

Using older measurements of solar variability over the 11 year solar cycle as input, climate models have proven incapable of establishing linkage between insolation and climate. Still, there have been tantalizing reports of such linkage in the past (see “The Sun's Hidden Power”). In a report in the August 28, 2009, issue of the journal Science entitled “Amplifying the Pacific Climate System Response to a Small 11-Year Solar Cycle Forcing,” Gerald A. Meehl et al. described a possible mechanism that could explain how seemingly small changes in solar output can have a big impact on Earth's climate. Their work explained how the upper atmosphere can act as a solar heat amplifier when UV radiation from the Sun increases.

Now, new, more accurate measurements taken by satellites have revised the amount of variability in insolation, particularly in the ultraviolet frequencies. In “Solar forcing of winter climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere,” Sarah Ineson et al. have applied these new data to a revised climate model and report positive linkage between insolation variability and climate. The researchers explain the importance of the new satellite data.

Over the centuries, mankind has experienced tremendous rainfalls and massive floods, monster hurricanes and typhoons, destructive tornadoes, parched-earth droughts, strong gales, flash floods, great snowfalls and killer blizzards, lightning storms sent down from the heavens, blind dense fogs, freezing rain, sleet, great hail, and bone-chilling cold and even an occasional mudstorm or two and in-between, periods of warm sunshine and tranquility.

And we are still here. We are perhaps a little battered and bruised from the wear. But there is nothing new in the weather to fear because we have been there before. We have learned to cope. We have developed knowledge, skills and tools to reduce the effects of weather extremes.

Today, every time a heat wave or a great flood occurs (such as those in Russia and Pakistan this year), voices arise claiming this is more proof of man-made global warming. I wonder to myself if these voices are intentionally ignorant of historical weather extremes or just dishonest.

Noting that "solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century," and that "the Maunder minimum (about 1650-1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe," the authors write that "motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK," they investigated the possible connection between these severe winters and low solar activity, identifying "regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England temperature record using reconstructions of the northern hemisphere mean temperature."

What was learned

Lockwood et al. discovered that "cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend" do indeed "occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic," and they state that "colder UK winters (relative to the longer-term trend) can therefore be associated with lower open solar flux (and hence with lower solar irradiance and higher cosmic ray flux)." They are quick to note, however, that "this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect."

For more than 25 years now we have been predicting a grim, overheated future of droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels and flash floods as global warming plunges the earth in to climate chaos.

Mankind’s profligacy with fossil fuels has led to billions of tons of carbon dioxide bring pumped into the atmosphere, creating a warming blanket around the earth – in turn triggering a global fever from which many scientists believe we will take millennia to recover.

But along this week come extraordinary claims that cosmic forces beyond our control may be about to plunge the Earth in to a mini-ice age or at the very least they will ameliorate the perilous effects of manmade global warming.

Rising to the rescue is the Sun, our life-giving star and the agency which, many global warming sceptics insist, is the real cause of the temperature rises we have seen in the last century or so.

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

The announcement made on 14 June (18:00 UK time) comes from scientists at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and US Air Force Research Laboratory. Three different analyses of the Sun's recent behaviour all indicate that a period of unusually low solar activity may be about to begin.

The Sun normally follows an 11-year cycle of activity. The current cycle, Cycle 24, is now supposed to be ramping up towards maximum strength. Increased numbers of sunspots and other indications ought to be happening: but in fact results so far are most disappointing. Scientists at the NSO now suspect, based on data showing decades-long trends leading to this point, that Cycle 25 may not happen at all.

As a new solar minimum takes our planet towards global cooling an increasing number of scientists give credence to a new theory blaming our Sun's wobble.

It started in 2007 when scientists saw that gravitational forces in our solar system may have a huge impact on Earth's climate. Professor Ivanka Charvátová, CSc. from the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, explains why there is suddenly so much interest in her theory in an exclusive interview with klimatskeptik.cz.

Professor Charvátová calls it Solar Inertial Motion (SIM) and she claims it will have serious impacts on our climate. She says a predictable "wobble" of our Sun called barycenter shift alters Earth's weather patterns. Few climatologists have yet studied this phenomenon. But the evidence supporting Professor Charvátová's SIM theory is becoming ever more compelling.

Our Wobbling Sun

Increased international interest in the SIM 'wobble effect' began after Australian scientist Dr. Richard Mackey published a paper addressing the effects of the barycenter shift in The Journal of Coastal Research in 2007. Mackey drew inspiration from the work of the late Rhodes Fairbridge.